Carrie Pletscher, Contemporary Art Practice FdA student

Despite the rainy start to the week, the group were warm, welcoming and eager to engage in the process of response to site.

My background in Garden Design has conditioned me to formulate a pragmatic response to a site - through technical surveys of dimensions, orientation and site features - so exploring alternative ways of recording the site, such as audio walks and GPS tracking, gave me a fresh approach, a wider palette of possibilities and encouraged varied responses from participants.

One of the aims of the residency was to use our interventions to gather opinions from park users, which would feed into the Heritage Lottery Fund development bid, so I was keen to base my response on the park users themselves, and how they use the site, rather than the wealth of historic features and mature planting schemes.

One of my first observations within the park was the enormous but unrealised potential for viewpoints due to the sloping nature of the site which had been developed into terraces. Our inherent desire to seek out vantage points was thwarted by the overgrown planting.

Environmental Psychology is the study of how surroundings influence people; how they feel, how they move about and how they interact. The former ‘Oval Bowling Green’ is no longer maintained as a bowling green but I was interested to observe that the majority of visitors followed the perimeter paths rather than creating ‘desire lines’ by cutting across the grass. This prompted me to think about the nature of this open space and to explore ideas for encouraging visitors to venture onto it; to challenge the historic ‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS’ status that bowling greens evoke.

I wanted to encourage visitors to walk about within the space, rather than to simply walk through it, so decided to use an ancient device for creating a symbolic journey within a confined area; a labyrinth. Labyrinths have featured in most cultures throughout history and have many uses ranging from spiritual contemplation to exercise and fun. They differ from mazes in that there is a single route leading to the centre and back out again. Additionally the decorative geometric pattern of the labyrinth could be viewed from the approach bridge and from other positions along the bandstand terrace - if the overgrown planting were cut back to create the potential viewpoints that I had earlier identified.

During group discussions I discovered that another student had developed a similar response to the former Oval Bowling Green so we decided to work together to create our temporary intervention. 

I envisioned a labyrinth of mown grass paths with a picnic glade at the centre, bordered by tall grasses and wildflowers which would increase biodiversity and insect habitat through a sustainable, low-maintenance and vandal-proof planting scheme.

(image by Jan Glennie-Smith, Available from: 

http://www.basicjoy.com/wordpress/bellehaven-on-the-james/

Given the short timescale and temporary nature of our interventions we decided to create the labyrinth using masking tape. Our 40m diameter design took two and a half hours to lay out and used over 700m of tape.

It was fascinating to observe how simple white lines compelled visitors to follow them, tracing the concentric circles, inspiring impromptu races and creating a sense of achievement for having completed the route. The space was reclaimed and reincarnated - if only for the afternoon – but I would be delighted to see the idea taken forward in the future development of the park.